by Leo Wiles
12 August 2015
I wanted to write in to see if either of you had experienced this issue. I feel like I am at a crossroads with my writing and have stalled my career. For years now, I’ve been supplying the weeklies and websites with gossipy celeb pieces and now… well, I’m over it. It doesn’t feed my soul (not sure it ever did) and I’m starting to hate it and myself. But as it’s all I have ever written about, where do I go from here? C
I feel your pain. Over ten years ago I woke up and found myself in the same predicament. I could not bring myself to write one more word about Paris Hilton’s commando bar dancing or work myself up into a 750-word frenzy about some young buck stepping out on his girlfriend, let alone work out who was dieting, puking or had just had plastic surgery.
Like you, show business was also my specialist area where I had honed my craft. I was loathe to leave my comfort zone – well, that is, until the week in which three different titles asked me to write about Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, (yes people, I am that old). One asked me to reunite them ‘kissing in the snow’; a second wanted an explosive bust-up angle, and the third requested a love triangle between Bruce Demi and her boy-toy (the ‘story’ was that they’d all ended up sleeping together before having a fisty cuff!). I told them all to talk to the hand, dusted myself off and never looked back.
The great news is as I left, I had a contacts book bursting with stars and their agents who were thoroughly sick of being pigeonholed as tabloid fodder. And better yet, I actually knew what they were up to, where they had been and had all the background info swimming around in my brain. My relationships with many PRs put me in the perfect position to put that inside knowledge to work. Chances are, you can too. Does a star have a new book coming out? A new role? A brand new spouse? Find out what new life stage they are in personally or creatively, then present it to your new round of long lead editors looking for insightful lifestyle pieces.
The sticking point here might be your salacious cuts and saucy turn of phrase. Which is why you need to be extremely careful with your pitch letter to prove that you’ve grown up and are ready to deliver a new house style that doesn’t rely on adjectives.
Have you ever outgrown a marketplace / found yourself bored to tears by what you were writing day in, day out? If so what did you do?
When I realised I had spent the ENTIRE DAY editing a piece about mascara I knew it was time to swear off working for womens magazines. I got a job editing legal writing and have stayed round about that niche ever since.
Brilliant! I’m still laughing. Worst of all I recall that I felt it was important writing about how to look after dry lips and hands during winter back in the day….